Authors: Richard Holmes
The government was already in trouble when Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, liberally interpreting orders to apply ‘a friendly demonstration of force’ to the Turks in an effort to deliver Greece, sank a Turkish fleet in Navarino Bay on 20 October 1827. Whigs and radicals were delighted, and Wellington’s Tory friends were shocked. Goderich lurched on until, on 8 January 1828, in tears once again, he resigned behind a borrowed royal handkerchief. Wellington was dressing at Apsley House the next morning when a note arrived from the Lord Chancellor, followed shortly afterwards by Lord Lyndhurst himself, who had come to take him to Windsor. He found the king sitting up in bed wearing a turban and a dirty silk jacket. ‘Arthur,’ he declared, ‘the cabinet is defunct.’ Wellington was invited to form a government on the clear understanding that Catholic emancipation should be no part of his programme. The duke asked for time to consult his friends, but asked the king if he had any particular objections, and discovered that only the Whig leader, Lord Grey, was unwelcome. Then he set off to consult Peel, who advised him to accept, although he warned that Catholic emancipation was bound to cause trouble, as were unreconciled Canning-ites.
When Wellington rode to his official residence, No 10 Downing Street, on Copenhagen, the charger he had ridden at Waterloo, he was making a political point. The king had assured him that he had no aversion to a strong government, and that was just what Wellington intended to provide. But he soon found himself mired in the treacle of patronage. Robert Peel was to be leader of the Commons, although Wellington was not pleased to be told by his somewhat chilly associate that he would have to give up being commander-in-chief. He reluctantly did so, advising the king to appoint Rowland Hill, who was so junior that there was briefly a plan to make him simply ‘Senior General upon the Staff, performing the duties of Commander-in-Chief …’ Charles Arbuthnot, husband of the devoted Harriet, was not offered a cabinet post, and for a time seemed inclined not to serve at all, but eventually rallied. There was no room for either Richard or William, giving the press a field day. Wellington had already been criticised for securing a peerage for Henry when Goderich was prime minister, and it was clear that, as far as family patronage was concerned, whatever he did was wrong for the press. He had a low opinion of journalists: ‘What can we do with these sort of fellows? We have no power over them, God, for my part, I will have no communication with any of them.’ Croker called to find him up to his knees in dispatch-boxes and letter bags. ‘There is the business of the country,’ he declared, ‘which I have not time to look at – all my time being employed assuaging what gentlemen call their
feelings.’
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Wellington held his first cabinet dinner at Apsley House on 22 January 1828. Everybody was scrupulously polite, but it was the politeness, as Lord Ellenborough put it, of people who had just fought a duel. The duke had never been comfortable with second-in-commands, and Peel, despite his many virtues, lacked Wellington’s iron determination. But over the months that followed, this determination was much in evidence: when told by the Treasury that a change in accounting methods was impossible, he replied, ‘Never mind: if
you
cannot accomplish it, I shall send you half a dozen pay-sergeants, who will.’
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He displayed the same military briskness towards the cohesion of the party, and had no time for waverers. ‘What is the meaning of a party,’ he protested, having forgotten his personal objections to the very notion of party, ‘if they don’t follow their leaders? Damn ‘em! Let ‘em go!’ He found the endless debate hard to tolerate. ‘One man wants one thing and one another.’ He said:
they agree to what I say in the morning and then in the evening they start up with some crochet which deranges the whole plan. I have not been used to that in the early part of my life. I have been accustomed to carry on things in quite a different manner: I assembled my officers and laid down my plan, and it was carried into effect without more words.
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It was an uphill struggle. In March, the government very nearly split over a relaxation of the Corn Laws, with Huskisson, the colonial secretary, coming to the edge of resignation before a compromise measure, which was to please few when there were poor harvests for four years, was passed. Then Wellington fell out with Huskisson over the abolition of two of the most spectacularly rotten boroughs – so putrid that they smelt too strong even for his cabinet – Penrhyn and East Retford. Eventually the cabinet agreed that Penrhyn’s members should go to Birmingham, and East Retford should be absorbed by the adjacent Bassetlaw. When the Lords obstructed the Penrhyn bill, Huskisson voted against the government over the absorption of East Retford. Early on the morning of 20 May 1828, he offered the duke his resignation, and although it was intended as a gesture, Wellington lost no time in accepting it. When some of Huskisson’s Canning-ite associates tried to intervene, eventually sending an ambassador who said it was all a mistake, the duke declared that: ‘There is no mistake, there can be no mistake, there shall be no mistake.’ And with that, he strode out to take a turn down Birdcage Walk in case Huskisson came to call.
The duke’s administration was weakened by Huskisson’s disappearance, for the Canning-ites felt compelled to follow him. Wellington decided to appoint Vesey Fitzgerald, MP for Clare, to replace Charles Grant at the Board of Trade. At the time, ministers then had to face re-election before they could assume office, and Wellington counted on Fitzgerald’s personal popularity as a good landlord and progressive Protestant who favoured Catholic relief. But he was opposed by Daniel O’Connell, founder of the Catholic Association. Although, as a Catholic, O’Connell could not sit in parliament if elected, there was nothing to prevent him from standing for election. He was duly elected, and the ensuing uproar ended with Wellington becoming convinced that: ‘This state of things cannot be allowed to continue.’ Catholic emancipation was the only answer. But he would need to take great care with the king. He warned him that rebellion was brewing in Ireland, and obtained permission ‘to take into consideration the whole case of Ireland …’ That summer of 1828, he was persuaded to go off to Cheltenham to take the waters, for the strain of office was visibly telling upon him. Peel warned him that the king, already inflamed by his brother Clarence’s deposition as Lord High Admiral after a spat with Wellington, grew daily more Protestant.
Wellington took almost as much trouble marshalling his troops for Catholic emancipation as he had over preparing the lines of Torres Vedras. Peel was persuaded to remain in the cabinet, and the king was at last brought round after a series of long and usually one-sided conversations. ‘I make it a rule never to interrupt him,’ admitted the duke, ‘and when in this way he tries to get rid of a subject in the way of business which he does not like, I let him talk himself out, and then quietly put before him the matter in question, so that he cannot escape from it’.
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Wellington compared it to a battle, because the king resisted him yard by yard. Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council, reported on 5 March 1829 that ‘Nothing could exceed the consternation which prevailed yesterday about this Catholic business.’
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At the final audience Wellington was supported by Peel and Lyndhurst, but the king, steadily reinforced with brandy and water, struggled on – there was his coronation oath, and he must consult the bishops. The three politicians offered their resignations and set off for London. They arrived to find that the king had given way in a letter with the agonised postscript: ‘God knows what pain it costs me to write these words. G.R.’
Gaining reluctant royal approval for emancipation was one thing, but getting the measure through parliament was quite another. The political cartoons of the period, in which the duke makes frequent appearances, testify to the strength of opinion on the subject: one shows the duke in league with the devil. Amongst the steadfast opponents of emancipation was George Finch-Hatton, ninth Earl of Winchilsea and fourth Earl of Nottingham, who spoke in the Lords ‘as if he were shouting on a windy day upon Pendennen Heath’ and was given to emphasising his points (as if further emphasis was required) by waving a large white handkerchief. He accused Wellington of ‘an insidious design for the infringement of our liberties and the introduction of Popery into every department of the State’.
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This was quite literally fighting talk. Although the duke disapproved of duelling, he felt that dispelling the prevailing ‘atmosphere of calumny’ would help his cause, and accordingly he demanded of the earl ‘that satisfaction … which a gentleman has a right to require, and which a gentleman never refuses to give’. The one-handed Sir Henry Hardinge, now secretary at war, was his second, and he asked Dr John Hume to bring a case of pistols to his house at 7.45 on the morning of Sunday 21 March 1829 for a meeting between ‘persons of rank and consequence’.
When Hume arrived at Battersea Fields, he was surprised to see Wellington riding towards him. Anxious to waste no time, the duke told Hardinge to look sharp and step out the ground. Hardinge walked twelve paces, and pointed out where Winchilsea was to stand. ‘Damn it,’ called Wellington, ‘Don’t stick him up so near the ditch. If I hit him, he will tumble in.’ Hume loaded both pistols (Hardinge could not manage it with his artificial hand), and Lord Falmouth, Winchilsea’s second, was shaking with cold and excitement. The two men took their positions, and Hardinge gave the word to fire. Wellington, a poor shot with a pistol, had intended aiming at Winchilsea’s legs, but seeing that his adversary kept his pistol arm at his side, he fired deliberately wide. Winchilsea fired in the air, and his second then read from a piece of paper. ‘That won’t do,’ said the duke, ‘it is no apology.’ The magic word was added, and the duke bowed coldly, touched his hat, wished them ‘Good morning, my Lords’, and rode away. Wellington told Gleig that he had not fought because it was ‘a private quarrel’, but because it arose from ‘a great public question’.
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It was still a remarkable thing to do. To duel was to attempt murder, and for the prime minister to break the law in such a way aroused great concern. The writer Jeremy Bentham ventured an epistle beginning ‘Ill advised man’, and received a brisk rejoinder: ‘Compliments. The Duke has received his letter.’ Charles Greville was more balanced. He thought that ‘all blame Lord W.’ and ‘the letters on the Duke’s part are very creditable, so free from arrogance or an assuming tone’ but that ‘the Duke should not have challenged him, he stands in too high a position, and … should have treated him and his letter with the contempt they merited’.
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However, the meeting had the desired effect on public opinion: the mob, hooting Wellington a week before, now took to cheering him. He treated the one with as little concern as the other.
Peel had introduced the emancipation bill into the Commons on 5 March 1829 with a four-hour speech, said to be far the best he ever made: ‘very able, plain, clear and statesmanlike’.
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The duke was not always a reliable speaker in parliament, sometimes hesitating, and sometimes saying more than his colleagues expected. But he opened the bill’s second reading before the Lords, on 31 March, with utter confidence and sincerity. He spoke slowly and forcefully, without notes, and with his arms folded. He believed that Ireland was on the brink of civil war, and appealed to those peers who sought to put down the Catholic Association by force of arms:
But, my Lords, even if I had been certain of such means of putting it down, I should have considered it my duty to avoid those means. I am one of those who have probably passed a longer period of my life engaged in war than most men, and principally in civil war; and I must say this, that if I could avoid by any sacrifice whatsoever, even one month of civil war in the country to which I was attached, I would sacrifice my life in order to do it.
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When it came to the vote, the bill was carried by 112 votes, a greater majority than most expected. ‘This tremendous defeat,’ thought Greville, ‘will probably put an end to anything like serious opposition: they will hardly rally again’.
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The unexpectedly large majority infuriated the king, who now railed against a disgraced parliament and a revolutionary people. This snapped Wellington’s patience, and he told Mrs Arbuthnot that the monarch was ‘the worst man he ever fell in with in his whole life, the most false, the most ill-natured, the most entirely without one redeeming quality’.
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Nonetheless, the king had no option but to give the Royal Assent to the bill after it completed its third reading on 10 April. It was a monumental achievement on the duke’s part, the brightest spot in his political career, but he had widened splits within his own party, for amongst the Tory peers who voted against him were some of his oldest political friends. And Catholic emancipation was no longterm solution to the problems of Ireland, which remained hampered by deep-seated issues of land tenure and excessive dependence on a single crop – the soon-to-be blighted potato.
Victory over Catholic emancipation raised Wellington to an eminence he had not occupied since Waterloo. Greville observed that he simply dictated to his cabinet, addressed the king in a style used by no other minister, and treated him as an equal. Cartoonists always found his unmistakable profile an easy target, and now he was Jarvey the Coachman, ‘The Man wot drives the Sovereign.’ Yet he remained personally unassuming. Howell Gronow tells how, probably in 1814, Wellington was about to ascend the stairs to the ballroom in the ultra-fashionable Almack’s club. He was wearing evening dress with black trousers, rather than the knee-breeches and silk stockings prescribed by ‘the fair ladies who ruled this little dancing and gossiping world’. As he approached, ‘the vigilant Mr Willis, guardian of the establishment, stepped forward and said “Your Grace cannot be admitted in trousers,” whereupon the Duke, who had a great respect for orders and regulations, quietly walked away.’
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At the height of his popularity over emancipation, he approached Hyde Park in his carriage on his way to Buckingham Palace, only to be told by the officer on guard at the gates that the Duke of Cumberland, as Gold Stick in Waiting, had given orders that no carriages should be allowed in the park. Wellington was a field marshal and prime minister, and the officer, quite understandably, said that he was sure that the prohibition was not meant to extend to him. The duke told him that he simply had to obey orders, and requested the carriage to go round the other way. Greville observed that while Wellington declared that the whole thing was a mistake, ‘the Duke of Cumberland and the Duke of Wellington do not speak, and whenever they meet, which often happens in society, the former moves off’.
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